Monthly Archives: October 2010

This week, the lunch session put on by the Learning and Teaching Center was called Harvesting Our Mistakes, and featured frank discussions about courses or parts of courses that had gone wrong, and what the faculty had learned from that. Some learned that even when it’s a bit artificial, there needs to be some coherent thread to a course (the lower the level, the more coherent the thread). Others talked about developing the confidence to make mistakes boldly and in public so that their students could participate in fixing the mistakes and also see that mistakes happen. Many agreed that it takes 3 tries to get a course right: the first time being a grand experiment, the second time overcompensating for the first time’s mistakes, and the third time settling into the right groove. And most people talked about how they exert far greater control over their classes (plan more, talk more, and generally bulldoze information into their students more) when they’re having a bad day, and how it’s a lot easier to go with the flow on a good day. Boy do I ever have that experience!

Well, I had a class go pretty poorly the day before sitting in on this discussion, so I was right there with the group. I was ready for the self-flagellation. I was ready for the moaning and gnashing of teeth. There were a couple of people who were talking about mistakes being good for students, but I figured I could safely skip over those comments as they weren’t really on topic. My topic. My Class Had Failed — I Had Failed. That was the topic.

But I got to wondering why I was having a hard time seeing an up-side to my failure. Maybe it was because it had been of the “I was having a bad day and therefore babbled at the students in incoherent loops, periodically asking them pathetically, hopefully, ‘Does that make sense?’ and taking very little comfort from their dazed head nods” kind of a class. Maybe it was because I was working with a professor I’d never worked with before and therefore left the class pretty sure I’d never hear from him again. Maybe it was because I’m pretty sure that one of my biggest failings (aside from being too tired to cede any control over to the students) was having so little sense of a coherent thread to the session that I’m sure the students had no idea why we were there. Complete failure of learning goals, there, and it was ALL MY FAULT.

But as it turns out, there are a couple of useful things I’ve learned from this and similar experiences. For one thing, I’ve learned that I really should always have the talk I’ve had with a few professors so far, saying up front that this is the first iteration of the class, and that afterward we should talk about what worked and what didn’t so that the next time we work together things go better. I don’t know quite why I get shy about that talk, but it always makes things go better. I think I also need to think of these classes less as one-shots and more as iterations. That’s how I think of them when they’re going well (one-shot plus follow up with students in my office plus work with the professor to hone the next iteration, etc), so why do I lose sight of that when things go poorly? And finally, I think I need to come up with a plan for what to do when this happens next time. If I were their professor I’d come back the next session and say “So, last time was kind of confusing, and this time I thought we’d go back and untangle some of those threads.” So what can I do if I’m not going back into their classroom? Surely there’s some option.

Of course, all this is complicated by the very real constraints of being a visitor to the class. I don’t get to start fixing my mistakes in the next class session, and since these were first year students it’s possible I soured them on librarians in general. But if there’s one thing that I learned from the lunch session this week, it’s that I’m not the only one who’s failed recently. We’re all human.

Back when I attended Immersion many moons ago, they presented me with a formula for a learning outcome: “Students will” + [verb phrase] + “in order to” + [goal]. Then we used action words from Bloom’s Taxonomy [PDF] (the higher order the better, usually) to come up with the verb phrase describing what students would be able to do, and connected that action to a compelling reason for them to know how to do that. So, for example (and not a great example), “Students will recognize key functions of a database interface in order to navigate unfamiliar databases by making educated guesses about functionality and options.”

In my own practice, two pieces of this are by far the most important. First, the formula puts the emphasis on what students learn, not on what I teach. Second, the “in order to” phrase is what I use to make sure my goals are information literacy goals rather than bibliographic instruction goals. “In order to use Boolean operators correctly” isn’t a good goal. Using Boolean is an action that may result in a goal of getting more relevant results from a variety of search interfaces, or that may help students deal with searches for concepts that don’t have standard vocabulary (very important in the humanities), but it’s not a goal in itself.

When I talk to faculty about the sessions I’m going to teach for them, I start with their goals. What are their learning goals for the course? What are their learning goals for this assignment? And then I match those to my goals for the session. That way we can prioritize what to include in the class, and we can both feel better about why we’re including those things rather than all the rest of everything we could include. And prioritizing is important because 2 goals is quite enough for a session — 3 if we’re feeling really ambitious. (Believe me, I’ve balked against that constraint HARD, but it’s absolutely true.) Whatever I can’t cover in the session, I include on a Subversive Handout.

I rarely write out formal learning outcomes, but I do keep the structure in mind all the time: students learn (not me teach), some learning action (I keep Bloom’s Taxonomy by my computer at all times), some interesting learning goal that’s directly tied to the course and the assignment. And for me, connecting the practical actions of research with the larger goals of being sophisticated scholars is what keeps me engaged and interested in instruction — what keeps me from burning out, or falling back on cookie-cutter classes. Others may have other ways of keeping themselves out of instructional ruts, but this is what does it for me.